by Linn Ullmann
One day, the mother, the father, and the doctor had to appear before a Norwegian judge to sort out the issue of paternity. They all got along famously. The mood was so upbeat that the courtroom proceedings could almost have been mistaken for a little party. The only obstinate person, according to the father, was the judge—long-faced and thin-lipped—who required the matter to be explained over and over again. Who, in truth, had had sexual intercourse with the child’s mother, and when? And after a long day in court, the mother felt that a glass of Champagne would be in order. But no such luck. The child’s father had to get straight back to the theater in Stockholm and husband number one was on late shift at the hospital. A quick glass of wine, then? Surely they had earned it? She certainly had. Waiting for evening to come, hoping that the child will sleep through the night. Lying in bed next to the girl in the flat at 91 Drammensveien, hoping she won’t wake up and start screaming. Sometimes the child cries all night and then she doesn’t know what to do, what’s wrong. Is the baby in pain? Is she sick? Is she going to die? Who can she call? Who will get up in the middle of the night and venture out into the snow and the dark and come to her aid? In the morning the nanny arrives. She is wearing an apron and a kind of nurse’s cap and a somewhat judgmental expression, thinks the mother, who is afraid of being late for work and also of offending the nanny, who has things she’d like to discuss. I’m so tired, the mother wants to say, but doesn’t. I’m going to be late. Can’t you just be quiet and let me go. It will be another two years before the child is christened, but on that day in court, by ruling of the judge, she is given the mother’s surname, and when the mother and the father meet or speak on the phone, they call her the baby and our love child and Swedish and Norwegian words for soft things—nap, maple leaf, linen, lull.
The mother and the father were lovers for five years and spent much of that time at Hammars. The house was finished now. Their daughter was looked after by two women, one called Rosa, the other called Siri. The one plump, the other willowy. One had an apple orchard, the other a husband who would get down on his hands and knees and let the girl ride around on his back while she hollered Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, HOPPLA! In 1969, the mother left Hammars, taking her daughter with her. Four years later, one summer day in late June, the girl came back to visit the father. She didn’t like leaving the mother, but the mother promised to call every day.
Nothing had changed, except that now it was Ingrid who lived there. Everything stood exactly where it had stood when the mother and the girl left, the grandfather clock ticked and struck on the hour and the half hour, the linen cupboard creaked, a golden light shone in on the pine-clad walls and fell in bands across the floor. The father crouched down in front of the girl and said gently: I suppose Mamma is the only one allowed to touch you.
She was small and skinny and came to Hammars every summer with two big suitcases that were left sitting in the yard until someone carried them into the house. She raced out of the car and round the yard and into her room and out into the yard again. She wore a blue summer dress that skimmed the tops of her thighs. The father asks: What have you got in your suitcases? How is it possible for such a little girl to have two such big suitcases?
His house was fifty meters long and kept getting longer, it took forever to walk from one end to the other. Running indoors was strictly forbidden. He furnished it and extended it, a little more each year, the house grew in length, never in height. No basement, no attic, no stairs. She would stay there for all of July.
He is dreading her arrival, hello and how do you do, there’s a girl running around the yard, a little girl with legs like pipe cleaners and knobbly knees, or she’s dancing, this girl is almost always in the middle of some complicated choreography, you can be having a conversation with her and instead of answering whatever question she has been asked, she’ll begin to dance, or else she plants herself in front of him, a challenge of sorts, and then he’ll smile, What now? What to say? What to do? The girl dreads being away from the mother, but looks forward to visiting the father, everything that is this place, the house, the island, her room with its flowery wallpaper, Ingrid’s cooking, the moors and the stony beach and the ocean stretching green and gray between her father’s island and the Soviet Union (if you lose your way and end up there, they’ll never let you out), and the fact that everything is exactly as it has always been and always will be. The father has rules. She understands them. The rules are an alphabet that she learns even before she learns the real alphabet. A is A and B is B, she doesn’t have to ask, Z is where Z has always been, she knows where Z is, her father is rarely angry with her. But he can get very angry, He has a bloody temper, the mother says, he can fly into a rage and shout, but the girl knows where the anger is and dodges it. She is skinny. Skinny like a filmstrip, the father says.
One day, the mother calls the father on the telephone, she’s upset because he won’t let their daughter drink milk. He believes that milk is bad for the stomach. The father believes that a lot of things are bad for the stomach. But especially milk. The mother believes that milk and children go together. Everybody knows that. What the father says about milk goes against the most basic knowledge of what a growing child needs. And anyway, says the mother, he doesn’t usually take much interest in the girl’s upbringing, but this, this, he has opinions on. The mother’s voice grows shrill, all children must drink milk, especially the girl who is so skinny . . . This, as far as I know, is the only quarrel the mother and the father have about the girl’s upbringing.
Change. Disturbance. Hello and how do you do. Let me look at you. You’ve grown. You’ve become pretty. And then, perhaps, he puts his thumbs and forefingers together to form a square so that he can look at her through the square. He’ll shut one eye and peer at her with the other. Take a picture. Frame her with his fingers. She stands perfectly still and gazes solemnly at the square. It is not a real camera—if it had been a real camera she would have wriggled and squirmed and wondered how she would look in the picture.
To be hauled away from what you’re doing, by a child. Not to be left in peace with your work, your writing. But it’s only now, at the moment when she arrives with her suitcases and it’s been a year since they saw each other last, only then is he hauled away from his work. She dances around the yard. He forms his hands into a camera and looks at her through it with the one open eye. I don’t know who carries the suitcases inside. Or unpacks them. Or hangs the dresses and shorts and T-shirts in the small closet in her room. Most likely it’s Ingrid. Soon he’ll be able to go back to his study (which lies at one end of the house, her room lies at the other) and continue working.
The girl’s mother, she who is responsible for the girl every month of the year except July and who believes that milk is good for children, would also like to shut herself away in a room and be left in peace, she too wants to write, she wants rules and an alphabet just like the girl’s father. But she can’t figure out how. The mother’s alphabet keeps changing, it’s impossible for the girl to keep up, no matter how hard she tries. All of a sudden, A is L. It’s baffling. A was A, but then it turned into L or X or U. The mother has tried installing herself in every room of the house in order to write, but all in vain. Disturbances wherever she goes.
My nerves are frayed, she says.
When the mother’s nerves are frayed, it is a good idea to be very, very quiet.
The mother and the girl live in a big house in Strømmen, outside of Oslo. They live in lots of other places too. But first, after they leave Hammars, they live in a big house in Strømmen. There’s a playhouse in the garden. On the wall inside the playhouse the girl has carved her name. No matter which room the mother chooses, the girl comes in and wants something. She wants to draw. She wants to ask a question. She wants to say: Look at this! She wants to ride her bike. She wants to brush her hair. She wants to dance. She wants to sit perfectly still and say nothing, promise, promise, not a word. She wants to dance ag
ain. In the end there isn’t a single room left in the house where the mother can work in peace, so she renovates the basement and turns a small part of it into a study. (The house in Strømmen, unlike the house at Hammars, grew in depth and not in length.) But the girl finds her there too. Basement Mamma. Underground Mamma. The mother is trying to write a book, but it’s not going that well. The girl finds her wherever she goes and then, when she does, the mother loses her concentration. And when you lose your concentration, the mother explains, it’s almost totally impossible to get it back.
Life with the mother was so much more unpredictable than life with the father. This had to do with the circumstances of life. The father would die first, it would probably be very sad, but not altogether unexpected considering how old he was. The father’s death was under way, the girl and the father were well aware of this, and that’s why they exchanged sad goodbyes every summer. They were good at it. Saying goodbye to the mother was a very different story. The girl would scream and the mother would hold her close, Don’t cry now, be a big girl and don’t cry, hugging her tightly, glancing around, trying to stave off the girl’s hands, which clung to various parts of her body. Is anyone looking? The mother is always conscious of who is looking and what they might be thinking. This screaming child. This ribcage-skinny girl so bristling with dissonance.
The father often told the mother that she was his Stradivarius. That is: an instrument of the finest quality with a rich, full-bodied sound. The mother took these words to heart and repeated them, He said I was his Stradivarius.
She is my violin.
I am his violin.
This is an example of how both the mother and the father allowed themselves to be seduced by metaphors. Neither of them knew or even cared about the numerous studies proving that a Stradivarius does not, in fact, sound better than other comparable violins.
On the other hand: what is the point of studies like these? There is always a smartass in the audience mumbling, I know how he does it, it’s just a bluff, that’s not a real magician up there on the stage.
But what have the mother and the father made here? Listen! It’s the girl! Well, one thing’s for sure, it’s not a Stradivarius. A small out-of-tune organ, perhaps, howling because the mother was leaving. And all this clinging—what’s that about? Is the child not quite right in the head? And what sort of mother goes off and leaves her daughter again and again? (It was the mother they looked at accusingly, never the father.) The mother cared about what other people saw and thought, but the girl didn’t care. She didn’t notice the looks. She clung to the mother. The thought of never seeing her again was unbearable. She fantasized about different ways of dying. The mother’s death, above all. And her own death as a natural consequence of the mother’s. It could happen anytime—the mother might die from an illness, in a car or a plane crash, or she might be murdered. She, who traveled all over the world, might accidentally lose her way in some country at war and be shot and killed. The girl could not cut a hole in herself big enough to disappear into if the mother died. She loved the mother most of all. Not that she thought about love—about the word itself and what it meant. If anyone had asked her about love, she might have said that she loved the mother, the grandmother (Nanna) and Jesus (because the mother and the grandmother had told her that Jesus loved her), and the cats, but that she loved the mother most of all. She missed the mother all the time, even when the mother was right there, in the same room. The girl’s love was more than the mother could bear. Having a child was harder than she had imagined. Arms and legs and big teeth and dissonance. She liked it best when the girl was asleep. My darling little girl. But when everyone was awake, it was just too much. Clingy girl. Clingy love. It felt as if the girl wanted to crawl back inside her. The mother would never have admitted that the clinginess got on her nerves, she was too full of desperate longing herself, of questions about who she wanted to be and who she was and what love was and ought to be. Her deepest longing, perhaps, was to be loved unconditionally, and at the same time be left in peace. But she never told anyone. It is shameful and egotistical to hope for unconditional love and at the same time want to be left in peace. The mother’s inner worlds were neatly sealed—dark, gilded worlds.
At Hammars nothing changed. Or rather, the changes occurred so gradually that you didn’t notice them, and for a very long time—until the father came seventeen minutes late without even being aware of it himself and thereby announcing that it was all over—the girl lived with the sense that the way things are right now is the way they have always been. Order and punctuality. The chairs stood where they had always stood. The pictures hung where they had always hung. The pine trees outside the windows were just as gnarly. Ingrid had a long, brown braid that flipped back and forth as she made her way through the house, dusting or fluffing up cushions.
Eventually, Daniel and Maria began coming to Hammars at the same time as the girl. They were older than her, but children nevertheless. And that was how it was: days and nights in the long, narrow house surrounded by sea, stones, thistles, poppies, and barren moors reminiscent of West African savannas. One summer was the same as the next. Every evening at six o’clock the girl and the Hammars family had dinner in the kitchen. Ingrid did the cooking and the food was always good. After dinner everyone would sit for a while on the brown-stained bench looking onto the gravel yard, on which first one car stood parked, later two cars and eventually a red jeep. Beyond the bike shed lay a forest with three trails running through it. And while the father and the children sat on the bench, Ingrid would stand—slightly leaning against the brown-stained post that held up the little pent roof—and smoke her daily cigarette.
The brown-stained bench was warm and slightly rough—if you rubbed your hand against it, you’d get splinters. The house was made of wood and stone and surrounded by a stone wall. In the evening, when the grown-ups were reading their newspapers, the girl would walk down to the sea on her own. The wave-sculpted stony beach sloped, and when she had walked far enough to be able to wade in the water, she would turn around and look up at the house and the stone wall. And then it was almost gone, vanished, all of it, lost in a haze of light and gray, gravel and sky, bleached by the summer sun, the years, the days, as if someone had thrown an invisibility cloak over it, although not completely invisible, the windows and the doorframes were cornflower blue, and these you could see, there was a house there, it couldn’t hide itself completely.
Every once in a while, someone would say: Why don’t we sit on the pretty side of the house, the side with the beautiful view of the sea and the shifting light on the horizon? But still they went on sitting at the front of the house, on the brown-stained bench, while Ingrid leaned against the post and smoked. It was as if everyone took part in the smoking of that one cigarette.
The father had a study in which he sat and wrote every day, The only thing I can brag about is that I’ve been diligent, he would say. The girl called his study the office, and every evening the office was transformed into a cinema. The father would pull a white canvas screen out of a black case, the lights were switched off, and the film could begin. The black case was so long and narrow that, when it was closed, it looked like a coffin—a coffin for a very thin person, a stickman. The case had snap locks and a handle like a suitcase or a ladies’ handbag, and during the day sat on top of a silvery rack leaning against the back wall.
And then, at eight o’clock, the father opened the case, whereupon what during the daytime looked like a coffin would turn into a milky-white movie screen of such impressive dimensions that it covered the wall like a taut sail.
In a little room separated from the office by a wall with a glass partition stood the projectors. During her first years at Hammars, the father ran the films himself, but later he taught his son Daniel to do it. Daniel was paid ten kroner per screening. The girl mustn’t touch the projectors. Touching the projectors was even more strictly forbidden than making noise during the grown-ups’ afternoon nap, more s
trictly forbidden than leaving the doors at Hammars open or sitting in a draft, about as strictly forbidden as being late. No one was ever late at Hammars. But no matter how punctual you were—you had an appointment and you arrived perfectly on time—you would still say: I’m sorry I’m late. This was the Hammars greeting, as familiar as gulls’ cries in summer. I’m sorry I’m late. And if, contrary to expectation, you happened to be running a few seconds behind, you would say: Forgive me for being late. Can you please forgive me? I have no excuse! That hardly ever happened though.
For the first few years, the girl is allowed her very own screening at six thirty in the evening. She sits in the big, battered armchair with her feet on a footrest. The black case has been opened and the projection screen unfurled. She is as skinny as a twig. She has long straggly hair and buckteeth. The father has switched off the light, closed the door, and stationed himself on the other side of the partition.
“Okay?” he calls out.
“Okay,” the girl replies.
The office windows are shuttered, dark, quiet.
“Do you feel a draft?”
“No.”
“Okay then, let’s watch the movie!”
Later though, long after the girl had started seeing films along with the grown-ups, the father decided to renovate the old barn beyond the lilac hedge at Dämba. The cinematograph was finished the summer the girl turned nine, although nobody called it the cinematograph, they called it bion, Swedish for cinema, and it had a heavy, rust-red door and a huge keyhole with light streaming through it. The cinema had fifteen seats—soft moss-green armchairs—and two cutting-edge sea-green projectors that whirred softly in the darkness behind a glass panel.